Written by Patrice Schneider

As independent media in emerging democracies battle for financial sustainability, often facing hostile governments, they are also battling with changing media trends, new technologies and platforms, and an audience demanding more of a say. However some things never change – editorial values. Ten years ago, journalists at El Faro decided to build an editorial brand on values, not trends.

[Kurt Vonnegut]] has long been attributed (we now know falsely) with the following quote: "The most interesting people I’ve met still didn’t know, when they reached forty, what they wanted to become."

El Faro , after 10 years in the publishing business, doesn’t either.

And it's not because those behind the organisation are out of touch, it's because they are smart.

El Faro is waiting, strategically, for the cards to fall before deciding what it should be. This is because El Faro's management see the media paradigm being turned on its head as never before.

They see a media industry where technology and consumer behavior are driving fundamental changes, while continuing to feed off each other; technology influencing media consumption, and vice versa.

On the content side, they see the traditional one-to-many medium (one source reaching out to many people) being supplanted by a new, many-to-many medium. In this new world, all involved  - whether publisher, broadcasters, or consumer - share equal and reciprocal control over content.

They see that publishing news on the internet still does not provide a viable business model, although it is still cheaper to operate than traditional media.

So, how has El Faro built a reputation for having an influence on the life of El Salvador when it is still to decide exactly what it should be?

The reason may be that El Faro focuses very little on how its content will be delivered. That is not the issue. Rather, it focuses on the critical role of media in society. A role best described by Neil Postman as “making sense of the world.”

This has been the driving force behind all 3,650 daily news meetings at El Faro since the news organisation’s birth, as the editorial team continues to build a brand around making sense of the world. A brand with editorial values can succeed and grow in whatever new media paradigm emerges.

The basic precept of El Faro is that fair, balanced, honest and impartial coverage has a brand value that will survive all changes in technology and user behaviour.

By remaining true to the 'value journalism' strategy, as opposed to going with the flow or following short term trends, El Faro is being seen by many in other emerging democracies as a beacon for independent news.

As with the majority of independent publishers who are using the web in these countries, financial sustainability is a major issue. The strategy has to be to leverage the lower costs afforded by online publishing in order to build a brand for the new media age.

El Faro’s solid brand equity could offer many options, such as becoming a web radio station, an investigative TV show, an electronic news agency, a traditional media outlet such as a magazine, or all of the above and more, should the market in El Salvador allow it.

It is this model - building a brand cost-efficiently using the internet before rather than being tied to one medium - that may help publishers in emerging democracies develop a financially viable strategy.